The Bitter and the Sweet of Valentine's Day

I’ll start by saying that this might be surprising to those who know me, but here goes.  Valentine’s Day is not always my favorite day of the year. 

The reason friends and family may be raising eyebrows right now is that I’m the resident incurable romantic.  My best-loved books, films and poems tell stories of love unrequited, then discovered, then fulfilled.  I tend to sigh a lot, even through a tenth watching of Toby Stephens as the brooding Mr. Rochester, telling Jane Eyre about the thread connected from his heart to hers.  I sometimes accomplish the impossible and bore even my newly-in-love friends by asking them again to tell me how they feel about it.

However, because I’m also somewhat of a pragmatist, on the other side of all that is this: if I had to find one word to sum up my own life and the lives of nearly everyone I’ve known, it would be “bittersweet.”  The dark and the light, yin and yang, blissful happiness combined with the pull of something not yet grasped. 

You may have love, but not enough (choose one or more):   1) money, 2) freedom, 3) health, 4) proximity, 5) ability to express it, or 6) *enter your own particular hurdle here*

As I said, bittersweet.

So, Valentine’s Day.  If you’re vulnerable to the need to fit in, as I was when I was younger -- it can be, quite literally, the most painful day of the year.   I suppose I still think of it as a holiday that tries just a little too hard.

I have a vivid memory of twenty little baskets lined up against the wall in fifth grade.  We walked along those baskets, each emblazoned with a name, and dropped our Valentines in.  Some were full, some weren’t, and everyone knew why.  I’ll let you guess how much wicker was showing in mine.  I can still remember that feeling.

As I got older, and was “without significant other,” February 14^th would shine a light on that fact like nothing else.  It always seemed as if there was a world premiere of a long-awaited movie happening at my house, lights criss-crossing in the sky, while inside, I acted out the worst kind of stereotype:  watching Roman Holiday, While You Were Sleeping, When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, or the aforementioned Jane Eyre in any of its adaptations, in sweatpants and fleece, making myself a special dinner and finishing off with Häagen-Dazs.  Sometimes, a lot of Häagen-Dazs. 

Granted, I’m fairly sure I’ve moved past all that, but it’s hard to know.  For the last fifteen years, I’ve had a dear love to spend the day with, so the hypothesis of my maturity hasn’t been tested.  Robert buys me sweet cards, and then goes above and beyond, writing even sweeter things inside them.  I buy him balloons, and make funny cards on the computer.  We go out to dinner a couple of days before or after the 14^th, to avoid the crowds and the impossible-to-get reservations.

But I still see the looks in the office when one of us (not me, for precisely this reason) gets flowers delivered on the Day of Hearts.  The recipient beams, but there’s always at least one who stands back and wears a look that lies somewhere between pleasure and pain.  A bittersweet look.

Working with people living with AIDS for five years in San Francisco taught me an important lesson:  say what you feel now rather than later.  So Robert and I hardly let a day go by without saying I love you -- on Valentine’s Day, and every other day of the year.

But of course, because I’m a Libra, here’s where I take a deep breath and even out the scale.  Having said all of the above, I’m currently watching a friend and co-worker experience a first Valentine’s Day of a new love as it blossoms, and I find myself sighing again (this is where the incurable part comes in).

It’s their day.  I want to set my curmudgeonly thoughts aside,  and wish them a lovely one together.

Happy Valentine’s Day, you two.

*♥*♥*

A Fresh Start

I take an almost childlike pleasure in new, fresh notebooks with their blank sheets of paper waiting to be filled.  The first day of vacation is my favorite, with all the days stretched out ahead, full of promise and freedom.  I hold my breath during the moment in the theater when the lights go down and the curtain goes up, in the hush of anticipation.

I love fresh starts.

Why, then, this refusal to take part in the most iconic fresh start that exists –- the day that seems to cry out for innovation, for reinventing oneself, for swapping out the old bad habits for the bright and shiny new ones?

I’m not certain when I stopped making New Years’ resolutions, but at some point the ratio of “Guilt:Success” must have overwhelmed me.  I suppose the process went from fun and whimsical to an exercise in disappointment, and I simply stopped.

Everyone knows that diets can only start on Mondays, right?  Interesting then, that my most successful ones have started, say, in the middle of the day on a Thursday.  I quit smoking, after years of First-of-the-Month Monday resolutions, at a time and on a day that I can’t honestly remember -- sometime in August before my 50^th birthday.

I know this may make me sound rather curmudgeonly and dark, like someone who refuses to believe in the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny.  The truth is that most people who know me would characterize me as an absurdly hopeful person.  I’m someone who believes that good can come from the most surprising places and in wonderfully unexpected ways.

It may seem like a non sequitur, but I’d like to share a snippet I took away from a lovely little book written by the Dalai Lama, called “The Art of Happiness.”  I’m not quoting here, and he may not have actually written this in so many words, but as I said, it’s what I took away from the reading -- and I love it so much that I’m not even going to look it up, as it might ruin it for me.

I believe he said that we all have the choice, every morning, of waking up and thinking of those who have more than we have, and being unhappy about it –- or of thinking of those who have less than we have, and being grateful.  In short, happiness is a choice we make every moment of every day.

For me, resolutions are the same.  This year, I suppose my resolution is to throw caution to the wind and decide in the middle of the month on a Wednesday at 3 p.m., that I’ll carve out more time for writing.  Or that I’ll eat more vegetables, appreciate my husband more, find more joy in work, or call my mother more often.

I’ll make choices, every moment of every day, to be happy.  In that way, every moment is a fresh start.

And I do love fresh starts.

~~~~~

Home for Christmas

My son is home for Christmas.

I almost said “my boy is home” but pulled myself up short.  At 28, 6’5”, and as self-sufficient as a man can be, my son is no longer a boy.  Since the beginning of time that law of nature has been tugging at the hearts of mothers, while simultaneously engendering a sense of pride that often requires a quick intake of breath.

Right now, he sleeps a floor below me, in the bedroom that will always be his, as promised.  It’s one of the things I’m making right from the last generation to this one – my bedroom disappeared when I drove away to college, but for as long as he wants it, and probably beyond that, he will have a bedroom wherever I live.

Someday he may sleep in that room with a person he hopes to spend the rest of his life with, perhaps grandchildren will snuggle into the matched pair of single four-posters in the other downstairs bedroom – but for now, he walks seriously and singly through life, studying, planning, laughing, training, thinking.

There’s that intake of breath again.  Have I mentioned that I’m very proud of him?

For now, he sleeps and dreams downstairs, of things I probably can’t imagine, surrounded by photos of his childhood, the tassel from his graduation cap, the book of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons we read together and giggled over for so many years, the old calendar with spectacular panoramas of great golf courses which never goes out of date, the picture on the wall of the scoreboard at a San Francisco Giants baseball game wishing him a happy 15^th birthday, the soft bear he named Booey when he was two – the one with the space where the nose used to be, because he very simply loved it away.

Many of those days were a blur for him, the speeding train of growing up.  For me, they stand out in bas relief, a fresco that I can walk along and remember so clearly, not only what happened, but how I felt about it.

I’ll spend the next five days drinking him in, before he flies off again to his good and productive life.  My mother, who loves him as I do, likes to say that she just enjoys sitting and “watching his hair grow.”  She does it overtly and dramatically, making him blush – I’m more of the furtive type, but I love him no less.

This is my best gift.  My son, my boy, is home for Christmas.  

My two favorite men -- Thomas and Robert

☆*♥☆♥*☆

The Big Green Cat Toy

“Felix! NO!”

“Rocky? Don’t even THINK in that direction…”

The annual torture has begun.  For them, and for us.

Let’s see.  We dangle pretty, shiny things at them all year long.  Say things like “What’s this? Pretty! Shiny! Come play!”

Then, we place something right in the middle of the living room, chock full of dangly, shiny things, something that smells good, like the outdoors, that sparkles…and we say…

“Don’t touch!”

I don’t know about your cats, but mine just look at me as if to say, “Are you kidding?”  And then, they casually begin to clean their fur. 

But I know what they’re thinking. 

“Sooner or later, you’re going to have to go to work…”

☆

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Please? I won't break it...♥

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